Eagle Forum Legislative Alerts

Thursday, October 31, 2013

On my Saturday Eagle Forum talk program, I recently interviewed one of our country's leading authors and scholars, Christina Hoff Sommers. She is a courageous woman who has the nerve to expose some of the feminist nonsense that has permeated public schools. She poses a question that parents should ask, Is my son really welcome in school? The honest answer is No. Public schools have become hostile territory to boys.

Here are several recent examples. Christopher Marshall, age 7, was suspended from a Virginia school for picking up a pencil and using it to pretend to "shoot" a "bad guy." Josh Welch, also age 7, was sent home from his Maryland school for eating off the corners of a Pop-Tart to shape it like a gun. Colorado's Alex Evans, also age 7, was suspended for throwing an imaginary hand grenade at imaginary "bad guys." These kids were guilty of nothing more than being ordinary 7-year-old boys. Yet, in all these cases, school officials found them in violation of the school's zero tolerance policies for firearms. The punishment of these kids was clearly a ludicrous application of the rule against guns. In the name of Zero Tolerance, elementary schools are becoming hostile environments for young boys.

Many schools have taken all the fun out of recess by banishing games like dodgeball and tag. Schools have replaced "tug of war" with what they call "tug of peace." Boys in public schools are routinely punished and publicly shamed. Boys are five times more likely to be expelled from preschool than girls. In grades K-12, boys account for nearly 70% of suspensions, usually for insignificant acts of insubordination.

The problem is that feminist dogma teaches that the genders are interchangeable, and the teachers are trying to make boys behave like girls. They are not going to succeed at that foolish endeavor, but they will make a lot of boys hate school.